Pro Tools Drum Edits

[Mathieu Benoit]

I'll never ever ever entertain the idea of editing audio in Cubase again. I tried both ways and they both work equally well (in the end), however.....

Cubase took 3.5 hours to perform the same operation I did in 10 minutes using beat detective in PT (editing on verse and chorus). It's too easy, it really doesn't feel right, it's like cheating. I feel like it should have been harder. In Cubase it felt like I was working a loop hope in the program, where as in PT it obviously felt like it was made for it.

All in all once I got the hang of it and tried it from scratch the second time, I was able to edit the entire song in just over 20 minutes. I don't even want to think about how long it would have taken me in Cubase.

From now on I'm recording all drums in PT, no exceptions. In case touch ups are needed, the option's there.

Thanks for the help in getting it started MacRae, after I got off the phone with you the rest was easy. There's still much to learn, considering this was an easy edit as the drums were very good to begin with. The real test will be when the original makes me seasick...

I still prefer Cubase for composition, so don't call me a convert or anything... But in terms of audio editing? Forget about it...


Obviously I'd still prefer a track that felt great to begin with, but this ain't too shabby when it's all ya got.

[Mathieu Benoit]

For this project though I probably won't keep the edits because then I'd have to look at editing other instruments too... and I don't really want to get into that, besides the drums weren't bad at all really. I just wanted an excuse to practice using Beat Detective. I'll just keep the edit on a separate playlist so that I can show MacRae later...

I haven't been this blown away by the elegance of a process that should be complicated since Melodyne though.

[macrae11]

Sounds good Matt. I'm glad you got along so well.

Cubase is great and has a ton of features for writers and arrangers that PT can't touch. But for audio editing, routing, and mixing Pro Tools definitely rocks. It's what it was designed from the ground up to do.

[Mathieu Benoit]

It's what it was designed from the ground up to do.

This became incredibly evident to me last night.... I'm not a Pro Tools user yet at all. So I'm not saying it's great because I have 10 years experience with it. I'm a complete novice, and that speaks volumes, I didn't need to be familiar with the software for this to be efficient. That says a lot to me.

BTW, Last night I learned about collection mode in beat detective. That makes editing drums that much simpler in that once you've determined your trigger points on your kick for example, you can then grab triggers from the snare and add them collectively to the ones you already had for the kick, then add the odd tom hit that may need to be adjusted and your trigger points collectively just add up. Then when you group all your drum tracks together and apply BD you're cutting and re-joining everything at one time, thus the tracks still all line up, and you've only made the edits you needed to make.... It's a damn beautiful thing.

So Andrew, when using BD on an entire drum take... What sources do you typically draw trigger points from? Do you ever find yourself doing the hi-hat, or do you find it unnecesary?

[macrae11]

Almost never from the hi-hat. If the hi-hat is so far out that it needs editing, I would have done another take. Once and a while if there's a hit or two that are sliding a little farther in the groove than I would like I'll grab a couple of them, but never a whole song.

Usually I just do kick and snare. Generally if those two are in time everything else will work out. Usually drummers are off the click, but not very often are they off with themselves. So if I can line up the 1, 2, 3 and 4, the rest of the groove generally falls into place. Obviously the occasional tom, or sometimes overhead on a drum fill, but mostly just kick and snare. This is of course on a good drummer. On a bad drummer, you just have to do what you have to do. Of course if that's the case often times it's easier just to fix a few bars and then loop it.

Thankfully I very rarely work with bad drummers.

BD also works beautifully on acoustic guitars. I probably actually use it there more than I do on drums. When you get the singer songwritery type person in, sometimes they aren't used to playing in time, or even with other people, so some major tweaking is sometimes required. Although usually I'll make them play to Groove Agent if I can, which helps mitigate these problems.

More and more these days though I'm using BD less and less. I'm working with session drummers most of the time, so I have far fewer issues. And the few minor ones that pop up, I'm finding it's easier to just nudge things using Elastic Audio.

[Mathieu Benoit]

Almost never from the hi-hat. If the hi-hat is so far out that it needs editing, I would have done another take. Once and a while if there's a hit or two that are sliding a little farther in the groove than I would like I'll grab a couple of them, but never a whole song.

Usually I just do kick and snare. Generally if those two are in time everything else will work out. Usually drummers are off the click, but not very often are they off with themselves. So if I can line up the 1, 2, 3 and 4, the rest of the groove generally falls into place.

This makes sense.. I likely went overboard for the sake of experimentation last night.

Thankfully I very rarely work with bad drummers.

Well aren't we special...

BD also works beautifully on acoustic guitars. I probably actually use it there more than I do on drums. When you get the singer songwritery type person in, sometimes they aren't used to playing in time, or even with other people, so some major tweaking is sometimes required. Although usually I'll make them play to Groove Agent if I can, which helps mitigate these problems.

This is good to know. I must try this out. I too deal with a lot of singer/songwriter types. I think they're good people, but more often than not, poor timekeepers. So this is something I'd like to try, I can't imagine how it works yet, as drums are not a sustained intrument so it seems easier to imagine being able to chop it all up effectively. I'll try it for myself though.

More and more these days though I'm using BD less and less. I'm working with session drummers most of the time, so I have far fewer issues. And the few minor ones that pop up, I'm finding it's easier to just nudge things using Elastic Audio.

I wish I was your session drummer... *insert poutty-face emoticon*

[macrae11]

You never know, I might have something coming up for you in a few months. I wasn't going to bring it up because I haven't confirmed with the client, but I'll keep you posted.

[Mathieu Benoit]

You never know, I might have something coming up for you in a few months. I wasn't going to bring it up because I haven't confirmed with the client, but I'll keep you posted.

This is why I like ya. I'll practice super hard for ya!

I mean, there's no sense having to use BD for nothing...

[Malcolm Boyce]

Andrew.... Would you put Beat Detective on a par with tuning vocals as far as a production/engineering choice?

I just finished mixing a project that I could have tuned the vocals and had a more technically perfect album, but it was my decision that it didn't need it, and sounded more like what was suitable for the style. I feel the same about "correcting" drums as I do about tuning and such, and I was curious about how others feel.

[macrae11]

I absolutely feel that they are at least in the same arena. Now in certain genres of music, a looped drum beat, or completely sample drum sounds are the norm, so then it has to be taken with a grain of salt. However I rarely work in those genres.

Technical perfection as you have implied is not always the better production choice. I can probably count on two hands the number of times that I have completely Beat Detected an entire song. About half of those times it was at the clients request, and the other half it was a production decision that I made. Quite often I'll make some small tweaks in a track, but usually they are small, and few and far between. And for doing that type of thing, I'll often take a portion of a performance that I liked from another take. The entire 3rd chorus for example.

If the musician is poor though, my clients have come to expect a level of professional production that sometimes requires some heavy lifting in the editing department. We probably use session musicians more than most studios so this is not an issue all that often.

A lot of times what happens, for me anyways, is I will work with a musician until we have an excellent take that we are both happy with. I'll usually put it away for a week or two then come back and have a listen, and see if it needs a tweak or three. I'm satisfied making those few tweaks because I know that we got the best possible performance, and if we had kept overdubbing and redoing parts, we most likely would have lost a portion of that performance that we really liked.

Now recently I did a demo with a great artist who specifically asked for no pitch correction. It was only a three song demo, but it was specifically showcasing her voice so she didn't want to mess with it in that way. Of the three songs we did, two of them I'm extremely happy with and wouldn't have tuned anyways. The third one I wish we had a bit more time to work on it, as I still found it a bit lacking. For the budget we were working with and the time constraints, I thought it turned out great as is.

[Mathieu Benoit]

OK... So in the end, there are two snare hits that will need to be edited to sit well within the track. There's a a backbeat at the beginning of verse 2. Also there's also a fill during a break that has two snare drums that should be a sixteeth apart, yet turned out to be a bit more like a flam. So the first hit needs to be moved back about a 1/32 note or so.

So Andrew, how does it work to do minor edits like this? I did a full "section-by-section" edit when I was testing and it was easy because there were seperation points everywhere. But in the case in each section I only want to move one note. So do I just make a trigger point for the shot I want to move or do I also trigger the following shot as to create a seperate region to adjust. I'm assuming the ladder although I had some issues when I tried it the other night.

When I tried to move the backbeat forward to the "2" (with a BD resolution of 1/4 note) it actually went backwards as if do disregard the resolution that I had set.

Anyhow, I'm going to try again tonight. Any suggestions?

[macrae11]

For these little types of edits, I'll often turn grid mode off, as it's easy to see where the beat should go, and sometimes it's easier to "feel" where the beat should go, and just manually place it. This will often sound a bit more natural that the perfectly quantized drum part. Especially for fills. So I would just take that snare drum hit(make sure the drum group is turned on) create a separate region around it, slide it to where you want to go, and then crossfade.

When you were editing the backbeat, and the region moved backwards, were you in regular grid mode, or relative grid mode?

Maybe post some screen shots, and I'll be able to see more clearly exactly what you're trying to do.

[Mathieu Benoit]

Thanks man, I'll try to do it manually tonight and I'll take a couple of pics for ya. You're right though, I don't need BD for this, I could've done it in 1 minute within Cubase by doing it manually, no sense over-complicating it in PT.

Tonight I'm going to make those little edits. I'm also going to "enhance" the kick drum by adding new samples. Then I'll dump everything to Cubase.

[Mathieu Benoit]

Edits are done, it was pretty easy, just took a bit of adjustment. Now I can finish tracking the rest of the overdubs. Overall not too bad for my first drum recording. But I have very much to learn....